The Australian general election held under the Alternative Vote has produced an evenly divided Parliament where a handful of independent MPs from the outback now hold the balance. As a result there are now no large ‘Westminster model’ countries left in the world with single party majority governments. Patrick Dunleavy reviews the lessons for the UK and for the UK’s May 2011 referendum on changing to AV voting on the Australian pattern.

Thanks largely to the success of the Greens in attracting one in every nine votes, Australians now have a lower house (called the House of Representatives) which is completely hung, for the first time since 1940. Although 5 out of 150 seats have yet to be declared, the table below shows that neither Labor nor the Liberal/National party are able to get to the 76 seats needed to win control outright.

Party

% votes

Seats

% seats

Australian Labor Party

38.5

72

49.7

Liberal/ National party

43.2

72

48

The Greens

11.8

1

0.7

Country Liberal Party

0.3

1

0.7

Independent

2.5

4

2.7

Other parties

4.1

0

0

Totals

100%

150

100%

Note: Now updated to reflect final election results.

The Liberal/National party beat Labour on the first preference votes, largely because of the Greens’ rise and some Labor infighting. But the Labor government still got a narrow majority of the votes including second preferences, 50.7 per cent to the opposition’s 49.3 per cent. Both the top two parties are negotiating with independent MPs, mostly from outback seats, to try and secure their support.

Australia’s Alternative Vote system operated as ever to strongly advantage the top two parties. Despite piling up 1.2 million out of 11 million votes, the Greens gained only one seat. The proportion of MPs sitting in the lower house who are not entitled to be there in terms of the first preference votes (the index of disproportionality) was nearly 16 per cent. This is a very high level cross-nationally, although it is less than the disproportionality score for Great Britain, which was 23 per cent in June 2010. In all, some 23 parties contested the Australian election, and the turnout (thanks to compulsory voting) was 75 per cent.

Australia’s relatively powerful upper house is the Senate, which is elected using the Single Transferable Vote. Here the Greens have so far won 6 seats on 13 per cent of the votes, with just over half the counts finished. The Greens should hold the balance in the Senate, completing a picture of a doubly hung Parliament.

Is this the death of the ‘Westminster model’?

For the first time in history, the Australian outcome means that every key ‘Westminster model’ country in the world now has a hung Parliament. These are the former British empire countries that according to decades of political science orthodoxy are supposed to produce strong, single party government. Following Duverger’s Law their allegedly ‘majoritarian’ electoral systems (first past the post and AV) will typically produce reinforced majorities for one of the top two parties.

But now the table below shows that four of the five key countries have coalition governments in balanced parliaments where no party has a majority. The one exception is Canada, where the Parliament has been hung since 2004, across three general elections. But somehow Canadian politicians have still not got the knack of constructing a coalition government.

Country (and population)

Current Parliamentary and government situation

Electoral reform position

India
(1,187 million people)

-Hung parliament including a large number of parties (perhaps 45, depending how you count them).
-The government is an 18 party coalition, headed by Congress; the rival BJP bloc also includes many parties.

-Political movements for the Dalit people ("untouchables") are campaigning for proportional representation, and reform is backed by the Indian Communist Party. However, electoral reform debates are still at an early stage.

United Kingdom
(62 million people)

-Hung Parliament
-A Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government is in power.

-A referendum on adopting the Alternative Vote electoral system will be held in May 2011.
-The coalition government will announce plans for a wholly or mainly elected upper house, reforming the House of Lords, in January 2011.
-PR elections are already in place for Scotland, Wales, London and electing Euro MEPs.

Canada
(34 million people)

-Hung Parliament across three general elections
-A Conservative minority government is in power.

-There have been significant efforts to change from FPTP elections to PR elections in several provinces, so far unsuccessful

Australia
(22 million people)

-Hung Parliament and two top parties neck and neck - whoever forms the government will depend on the votes of Independent MPs

-The Alternative Vote is used for the lower house, and STV for upper house elections.

New Zealand
(4.4 million people)

-A coalition government is in power, and no party has had a majority in balanced Parliaments since the voting system reform in 1996.

-New Zealand adopted an Additional Member system of PR in 1996, following two referendums for reform.

These developments do not mean that the whole of the ‘Westminster model’ concept should be ditched quite yet though. Although Duverger’s Law is clearly dead, and the idea of using a voting system to artificially create Parliamentary majorities is on its deathbed. But in all five these countries, the executive is still in a powerful position relative to the legislature. This is especially true on budgeting issues, as a new book from Joachim Wehner clearly demonstrates.

Yet although ‘Westminster model’ countries continue to share a powerful institutional heritage, it seems doubtful that the electoral aspects of the model can ever be the same again. For the UK’s forthcoming referendum on adopting the Alternative Vote, this recognition that the world as a whole is changing towards more complex and multi-party politics may sway some more voters and politicians towards backing reform.

Then again, since the Australian system, like ‘first past the post’ elections, has now failed to produce a clear electoral outcome, those who hanker after artificial majorities may take it as further reason for opposing change.

Small correction in the Table : India has had proportional representation for the so-called ‘untouchables’ with 25% of the seats reserved for those belonging to these backward communities. These measures have been in place since India became a republic way back in the ’50s.So whats mentioned is factually incorrect.

To clarify, the Indian lower house, called Lok Sabha, has 543 elected members. All of them are elected by the first past the post (FPTP) method, and none of them by a proportional representation system.

However, 79 of these seats are reserved for the Scheduled Castes and 41 for the Scheduled Tribes – forming 22 per cent of the lower house in total. This measure is designed to ensure that these historically very disadvantaged ethnic groups are not under-represented in terms of MPs, and so it gives a fair share of seats to them, and is proportional in that sense.

But within these reserved seats the competition between parties and candidates and the counting of votes is the same process as in all other seats across India – that is to say, the election takes place in a single member district and the candidate with the most votes wins, whether they have a majority of local or not. There is no balancing of party representation with votes received, so there is no form of PR system in use.

Actually, no. The three parties that have won seats in the federal house of representatives, consistently since 1982 are the Liberals, Nationals and ALP. All majors. Never minors….until recently.

The Liberals and Nationals would be a comparatively small party (with Nationals only representing country seats) if they did not form the Coalition, which, in common local lingo is thought to be a single party. And in the case of Queensland, it is now the same party. In other states it’s more complicated (with some Nationals members having the right to cross-bench, which they do frequently in voting patterns but rarely for elections).

In this election, the number of seats LNP coalition took from the ALP rose.

In other news, the ALP is Australia’s oldest and largest still existing party.

The other large but nonetheless “minor” party, which only just won it’s first seat at a general election, is the greens. Been in the senate for ages, but never the Federal House of Reps till now.

We also have about 20-30 other parties – our small parties. Most of these have never won a seat anywhere at any time, and rarely get more than 3% of the vote apiece. Their purpose, usually, is to raise single or narrow issues (and organise protests), and for their preferences to get shifted up to the majors, usually after being funnelled through other minor parties.

And it’s interesting to note that their overall voting numbers increased too. Plus we have one more independant….(the other three have been federal for no more than 3 general elections). Plus our informal votes are up.

All this indicate bipartisan disatisfaction. We had two dodgy choices, and said, nah, bugger the both of you. That’s pretty much it. But it skews on issue regionally.

P.S. The 79%ish turnout figure on the AEC – that means how much they’ve counted so far. It will rise to the total number of actual votes when they’re finished, and that will be equivalent to the turnout for that electorate (seat).

Mark, I agree with your analysis of the Australian constitutional set-up. I also agree that Canadian politicians have lagged in adjusting to coalition politics because of the influence of two-party models from the close-by USA, and because a nationalist/separatist party like the Bloc Quebecois is very hard for other politicians to risk doing a deal with. It is interesting that in the Scottish Parliament, the separatist Scottish National Party has been the largest party and has had to form a minority government. Because of their support for the union of Scotland with the UK, none of the other big three parties (Labour, Liberal Democrat or Conservative) would risk being contaminated by partnering with the SNP.

On David’s query about what is the ‘Canberra Territory party’ – I took the liberty of ‘translating’ the real label of ACT (standing for Australian Capital Territory) Party for a wider world readership. Canberra is the Australian capital and (like Washington DC in the USA) it is not part of any of the Australian states. A party that just represents its residents’ interests won a seat there.

Patrick, sorry, you’ve translated this wrong. The only party that won lower house seats in the Australian Capital Territory was the Labor Party.

I think you were trying to translate the fact that one seat was won by the “Country Liberal Party”, which is the conservative party in the [Northern] Territory. It’s essentially the Liberal Party’s branch in the Northern Territory, and it’s several thousand kilometres away from the Australian Capital Territory.

If you think I’m wrong, try to find a single reference to the “Canberra Territory Party” or the “ACT Party” on the Australian Electoral Commission website!

I really don’t find Australia’s election results surprising. Yes, they have a hung parliament, but only barely. And historically small parties have captured seats almost every election in Australia. In fact, this is a bad year for small parties.

Do you call it bad year for small party? I don’t think so. When country heads towards extreme capitalism, big fish eats small. The real debate started in Australia. May be in next election the “republic” agenda will work and small will give headaches to the biggest 2.
Best regards, from Nepal

Great article, I was wondering about this myself when I heard Australia had ended majority rule. I’d like to clarify for people that it does not seem you are implying that hung parliaments are necessarily a bad thing. A vibrant coalition atmosphere can produce very cooperative governments willing to compromise to make real progress. Australia is an interesting case, their senate uses one of the most fair and reasonbale PR style systems, STV, and has produced a reasonable result with the Green’s having somethingg close to their deserved support. It would be interesting to see analysis of what the lower house would have looked like using STV. Because of AV’s biases and their party system with only one strong third party their lower house has the worst of both worlds now with a result that is only slightly more fair and a coalition that will hang on the aggreement of a few non-aligned members.

I’m from Canada and this is all really interesting for us because we are so influenced by the US style winner take all mindset that its actually anathema for the two major parties to even admit they could enter into a coalition. The Liberals (second party by a little big, centrist) toyed with the idea of a coalition after the last election and got punished for it with cries they were trying to ‘steal’ the election because they didn’t win the most seats.

The other problem for us is twofold: the party with the most seats are the Conservatives who can’t really form a coalition with anything since they are too extreme, and second, a large number of seats (about 50 out of 308) are held by the province of Quebec’s separatist party the Bloc. They’re actually quite reasonable and constructive on most issues as long as you don’t try to infringe on their province’s powers. But they have abetted in two provincial referenda that would have had Quebec declare independence so no one can form an official coalition with them since it would give them too much power, yet without those 50 seats its a tricky thing to accomplish.

Thanks to everyone for these very helpful and interesting comments, especially those correcting or disputing aspects of my Australian knowledge. I used the Australian Election Commission and ABC for my sources, but of course these were only interim results at the time I wrote. The final results will be clear soon and we’ll update the blog for those.

I think Australian politics is of great interest for people in the UK at present, because there is a real chance that we are heading for ‘an Australian solution’ to our long-running constitutional dilemmas. The task begun so well by Tony Blair (for which he gets little credit yet) was to dismantle the last vestiges of an executive-dominated ’empire state’, built up in the schizophrenic century when the UK was becoming a liberal democracy internally, while running a vast overseas empire despotically at the same time.

Australia’s solution of an AV lower House of the legislature with two-party dominance still and strong govenrment, allied with a more proportionally-elected upper House has been attractive for more conservative UK reformers who doubt that we can get to the other possible model – namely a European-style liberal democracy with full PR elections and regular coalition governments. Australia’s shift towards multi-party politics (true of all liberal democracies now except the USA) suggests that even this half-way house model is in flux.

Looking more generally, the concept of a ‘Westminster model’ or ‘Westminster system’ is all over the field of comparative politics. Yet like Duverger’s alleged ‘Law’ it is years or decades out of date now and has sharply diminished actual empirical relevance to modern conditions. So my blog is in part an effort to persuade my academic colleagues to stop repeating the old mantras that they learnt in grad school many years ago, and instead to wake up and smell the coffee!

As an Australian, this shows why the UK electoral reform debate is silly.

AV is better than FPTP, but not because it is any more or less likely to avoid hung parliaments. And not because any more proportionally representative.

AV is better than FPTP because it allows people to express their preferences more fully than FPTP.

The best argument for AV is “okay, we cannot have PR because we do not like it or do not think it appropriate, but we can at least improve upon the shoddy nature of FPTP and, in doing so, we can allow people to better express their preferences”.

AV is thus a halfway house on the way to PR, but it is halfway along the “expressing preferences” spectrum, not the proportionality/hung-parliament-avoidance spectrum.

Your turnout figure for the Australian general election is incorrect. Currently, turnout is listed as 79% but there won’t be a final figure until all votes are counted in a couple of weeks time. Turnout is likely to be around about 95%.

I’m not sure that I see the problem here. No harm, no foul? In general, doing nothing is very often quite the best thing a legislature can do–and when there is a situation that clearly calls for some legislative action, then that very clarity obviously should insure that there will be a clear majority of honest patriots who will pass the required legislation. There are basically two other cases. If it’s an emergency, then that’s exactly what the executive branch is supposed to respond to, and then the legislature and courts will consider what happened as leisure allows. If it isn’t an emergency, but there is no course of action that a majority supports, then it only seems proper to continue looking and waiting–looking for a course of action that can get majority support and waiting for a change in circumstances that may justify pursuing one of the known options.

This article doesn’t add up for me. It appears that you’re using Australia’s hung election results, which came through an Alternative Vote system, to make a debate against the UK First Past the Post system.

It doesn’t make any sense.

Westminster system refers more to the structure of government than the method of voting. Are you against FPTP voting or are you against the Westminster system? Or is the entire article just philosophical?

Personally, I prefer the AV system over FPTP. But I wouldn’t use Australia’s hung election results as an argument to support that.

I agree that the argument here is a little confused. I think that you could look at this as the death of two-party politics. In Australia it has taken this long simply because Labor and the Coalition had such an iron grip on power.

As a kiwi, I don’t see that a hung parliament is really a problem for Australia. Since NZ’s switch to MMP, politicians in Wellington have realised that they have to play a long game, rather than grasp at power. Parties with the balance of power who play off the bigger parties for their own benefit rather than the benefit of the nation usually get hammered at the next election. It often takes a while for the necessary mind shift to settle in amongst the political class but things will settle down eventually.

I’d suggest the hung Parliaments only reflect the modern homogenised political parties where spin and being “on message” is more important than an issues of substance.

In a market where the products are almost indistinguishable and both represent lousy value, it’s hardly surprising that voters struggle to decide between them.

An assumption of this post seems to be that hung Parliaments assumed to be against the Westminster model? It could be argued not having the party whips dominating house processes only strengthens the model and makes it more democratic.

Finally Patrick, I’d take issue with your editor over the introduction to this post. Of the three independents at the time of writing, two of them represent seats a long way from the Outback.

The Australian government is formed primarily in the lower House of Representatives, as in Britain and Canada (House of Commons). That House is elected from single-seat constitutencies by AV/IRV, a non-proportional system. Its results cannot invalidate proportional representation.

The fact that Labor has more seats in the House with fewer first first choice votes than the Coalition is probably due to Green transfers, and is completely legitimate. AV/IRV may be disproportional but it yields more information about voter preferences than any measure of proportionality based on first choice votes.

It is likely that if the Australian House of Representatives were elected by PR-STV with an average district magnitude (seats per constituency) equal to the Senate’s 6, then with the same party first choice votes the Labor party would have fewer seats than the Liberal/National Coalition (though more seats than the Liberals alone), but a Green-Labor coalition would have a majority of seats in the House.

India and Canada have strong regional parties (much, much more so in India) and so it mitigates FPTP. Even the two main national parties (the Congress and BJP) act differently depending on which state they are operating in. I’d be curious to know if India is a de facto proportional representation system.

What you are seeing here is the aftermath of an epidemic of faction, a disease which is always immediately fatal to a body politic, but which may leave its victims twitching in a somewhat lifelike way for decades. The outbreak originated in America. There is no hope for any polity that falls victim to it.

It’s unlikely, given that the Coalition is ahead in most of these seats. Labou has also recently lost a seat to an independent in Tasmania, based on postal and absentee votes. The ABC predicts the final outcome to be Labor 72, Coalition (liberal party + national party) 73, Greens 1, Independents 4.

The situation is made more complex because a National Party member from Western Australia has refused to be part of the Coalition agreement, and will sit as an independent on most issues except confidence and supply.

[…] Why FPTP voting is dead across the world by Sunny Hundal August 23, 2010 at 5:46 pm The Australian election is the final nail in the coffin of the Westminster based First-Past-the-Post system of voting, says research by the LSE Politics and Policy blog. […]